Though we may think of it as a start-up phenomenon, the lean movement reaches deep into the enterprise. In recent interviews I've heard lean start-up principles articulated by companies as large as AT&T and Nokia Siemens Networks. At the same time I've heard the pressure to do lean processes from companies like The Washington Post and National Geographic.

There are two drivers of lean principles apart from the obvious one - competitiveness.

Lean has given enterprises, which have already shaved back on costs, a new language for motivating people to get creative on limited resources.

But there's also the big fear. Companies see dozens of start-ups each year taking aim at them. Most can be laughed off, but one of them is going to hurt, perhaps terminally.

Lean is appealing, then, to people in enterprise settings, particularly those who already take responsibility for agile processes.

According to Brant and Patrick, however, even the owner of agile realizes their organization is not changing fast enough. That's where lean comes in. But companies are also typically doing agile wrongly.

A problem for companies with agile processes is also under-resourcing. They know they must go out and interview potential customers in order to build the use-cases that make for good product but there's no time or budget for that. So personnas and use cases are made up. The lack of engagement created by taking short cuts only become apparent when a product hits the market.

Brant and Patrick's book is n attempt to bring discipline into that. It looks at innovation as a continuum from, on one end, disruptive to, on the other "sustaining" (see the image below). Companies need to locate where on this spectrum their innovation needs' lie. Then there are three steps:

#1. Interacting with customers and segmenting the markets in a non-demographic way, focusing on shared pain.